By Loveday Why
Big sleep? Tui bird happy birthday. Mama? Dada climb tree. Hat on. Trousers on. Flower! Look. Penguin move head. Look at Sol. Carty hold hands. Walk. Cup a tea. Make lots of cake. Up tree. Too loud, duckies! Dada work all day long. Here you go baby. Come with me. I come back! Cat.
My daughter, Sol, has an incredible knack of making every hour golden, so when I’m not with her and focusing on work, I have been functioning differently to how I was before. I’m a bit more streamlined and the “Golden Hours” (the two undisturbed hours in which you move through your more challenging work tasks) are actually golden. Mostly.
In the days before Sol I would spend whole days wandering aimlessly, lying on the beach, journaling, walking, swimming, resting and daydreaming. However, though it was beautiful and expansive – apparently unproductive – crucially it was also part of how I worked. The daydreaming activated a process of information downloading and allowed my subconscious the time and space to piece together the world for me.
I see now that – until recently – this open time had become the time I spent with my family and friends, playing or meditating. So in my work time, I had been running on a more forward moving, visibly productive, even masculinised energy, separating myself the more spacious ways of being.
The female roles we are used to, such as “housewife” or “career woman” and now “mompreneur,” “boss babe” and “Instamom” are based on internal separation too. There isn’t much room within them to hold together creativity, work, mothering, and the feminine energy that runs through all of it and honours our wholeness. For mothers who work, who mother and who create (which I’m pretty sure is all of us), there must be a way to birth a new paradigm that allows for: whole mother, whole creative, whole woman.
